Anti-Japanese agitation and violence spread to all corners of China yesterday, provoking fury in Tokyo and concern in Beijing at the aggressive nationalism sweeping the country.

Tens of thousands of people threw bottles at Japanese targets in the southern city of Shenzhen while smaller protests broke out from Shenyang in the northeast to Chengdu in the southwest.

A protest in Hong Kong was peaceful. But a demonstration on Saturday in Shanghai, mainland China’s most cosmopolitan city, led to smashed windows and a mob punching and kicking two passing Japanese. Despite the use of hundreds of police to stop a planned march in Beijing, following the stoning of the Japanese Embassy the previous weekend, there were still indications that the protests had the government’s approval.

But there are also fears that the authorities cannot put the nationalist genie they have conjured up back into its bottle. Through the People’s Daily, the official communist newspaper, party leaders stressed the importance of “social stability,” heralding a possible parallel crackdown on peasant protests against corruption and land clearances.

The immediate cause of the anti-Japanese outrage is the reissuing of a Japanese textbook, which glosses over wartime atrocities such as the deaths of hundreds of thousands in the Nanjing massacre. The book is produced by a Japanese right-wing group and used in only a tiny minority of schools, a fact of which most Chinese are unaware. But the communist leadership has used it to whip up public sentiment.

Its political goals are clear: to prevent Japan from winning a permanent seat on the U.N. Security Council, thereby diluting the force of China’s veto.